A few months later than expected, Debian 5 has finally arrived with a bundle of new goodies: Java is finally in the Debian repositories thanks to IcedTea and OpenJDK; Firefox (rebranded as Iceweasel) is now at 3.0; and official live images are ready for our downloading pleasure. TuxRadar has a detailed look at Lenny along with an explanation from Steve McIntyre, the Debian Project Leader, on why it was delayed. Earlier this week, we already detailed the new features in Lenny.

However my experience of comparing Debian to other distros over the years (and mind you, Debian is not the only one I like), is that a Debian release is indeed bug-free for any practical purpose.

It really does depend upon one's definition of "bug". Say you are running Debian, you go to YouTube, or whatever, and a Flash video won't play because your version of Gnash is not new enough. Or you try to open an ODF document and it doesn't work because your version of Abiword or Gnumeric is too old. Are those bugs? Many would argue that the software was not intended to play that Video, or open those ODF files, so they are not bugs, but simply a lack of particular features. My users would call them a bugs. And I would be hard-pressed to dispute them.

Note that I am not criticizing ODF, here. It's not that ODF is a moving target, but that ODF support in Abiword and Gnunmeric are incomplete "works in progress" at this time. And we all know what a "work in progress" Gnash is.